Stephen Pickering

Author: Stephen Pickering

An Easy Step To Increase Your Blog’s Exposure
*Update 10/28/09 – You know something cool that I just noticed: The post you make on FriendFeed itself gets indexed on Google. Type into Google: Increasing Blog Exposure. My Friendfeed Post is No.1! At least as of now. That’s not a bad keyword to rank No.1 on. Now its not a direct link to this post, but a direct link to the post I made in FriendFeed that has a link to this very post. It may be because there are 4 “Likes” and a few comments on the post itself that give it that extra juice, but that’s good if Google takes that into consideration because it’s using FriendFeed’s meta data to point to more relevant information. I may have mentioned it before, but by posting to FriendFeed you also get the benefit of an automatic back link. Same for Twitter. Oh, I would also say, make a Facebook “page” for your blog and post there too. I’m assuming since “pages” are public that they are indexed too, but I’m not sure on that point. Still it can’t hurt. You can also look for Facebook “Groups” that relate to your topic and post there, but you don’t get any media to put with it and you have to do them individually one by one. I’m hoping that since Facebook bought FriendFeed, they’ll be adding some it’s functionality there soon. Because Facebook has almost as many uniques as Google itself does! Massive untapped potential!

If you’re not a member already, join FriendFeed, a free microblogging network that is like the Twitter that we always wished that were. FriendFeed has a number of cool features absent in Twitter, namely in line media, uploading files, way better search, and for the purposes of this blog post, most importantly “Groups.”

Groups in FriendFeed is like a regular account but narrowed to a specific topic and most of the groups, once you join, allow anyone to post to them. So when you have finished a blog post go into FriendFeed and search for groups around your topic. You go into “browse/edit groups” and then at the top right there’s a link to “Find Groups” in which you can type a search term.

For instance when I release a new song I’ve recorded, I search for groups around music and join them. The other day I released a new song and did just that. There were a number of Groups concerning Music, some with thousands of members, some with hundreds, some with just a few. I chose to join 10 groups to start, there are many more, that I will probably add later.

Here’s the cool part: You only have to post one time to add the post to as many groups as you want. It’s like Twitter but you get more text to write, I think around 250 characters, and you can upload a photo and or a media file (in my case a song) with the post.

And as opposed to Twitter where you have to depend on the number of followers you have, and even then, there’s probably on a few percent of those who may be interested in the particular topic that you’ve written about that day, with Groups on FriendFeed, the members of those Groups don’t have to be following you to see the post, and they are already interested in the topic, so that even in a small group of only 20 or so, you’re going to get more engagement.

So the benefit with posting to FriendFeed Groups is that you can post just one time and get in front of an interested audience automatically, with the added benefits of a photo, media, and more text to grab their attention. Also, FriendFeed doesn’t shorten your link, so that viewers are more likely to feel safer and click it.

Now the drawback is that FriendFeed is small, but not too small (around a million uniques per month), and the topics and by its nature the membership leans more towards the tech arena. So for instance a topic like “Blogging” which is what this blog post is about it, has a lot of Groups, but a topic like “Knitting” may have very few or none at all (I haven’t checked) But I did have no problem finding quite a few groups around Music and Wine, the topic of a couple of my recent blog posts.

So depending on the topic this step may get you from quite a lot, to only a small amount of extra exposure. But with the ease with which its done, and the level of engagement that follows, its more than well worth it.

Also, it adds you some Google juice because the FriendFeed pages and Groups (unless they are private) aren’t behind a walled garden and are optimized for search. Plus you’ll be part of a like minded community to engage with, make new contacts, and increase your knowledge.

Oh, and did I also tell you that you’re post will automatically be Tweeted to your Twitter account by FriendFeed, if you so choose, as well?

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October 17, 2009
How to Find Something To Blog About

“Everything important always begins from something trivial.” – Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the U.S. 2006

*Update 10/27/09 This is probably already in there or at least the sense of it is, but it was like today I had nothing to write about or at least that I was interested in. And I told myself, “Don’t force it, let it come naturally.” So that would be my message: Don’t force it, but do keep in the back of your mind that any and everything you do has the potential to be a blog post. I’ve seen some great one paragraph posts. Look at this one for instance. Just a little piece of news that he was repeating. But it was timely and relevant to his topic, and he was interested in the news. I don’t know if it went viral or not, but I heard about it on twitter, considered the information valuable and signed up to receive email updates from his blog. So I know it got some sizable audience. So one idea is that you can even repeat a piece of news, especially if its timely and you are interested in it. Interest creates energy, so that your likely to add your own additional content or “take” on the news to your post as well. When all else fails you can simply copy and paste another blog post or news story as your post, as long as you are really interested in the subject and/or it’s related to your site. Of course give full credit to the origin and a link as well. An example is what I did here. I’m highly interested in the story and also it’s relevant part of my business (I’m Re-Selling Rackspace Cloud Sites). I wouldn’t do it too often. I think I’ve done it twice here on my blog out of about a hundred posts, but it is another option.

*Update 10/22/09

Commenting as Sources for Posts

Here’s an additional tip I just thought of while I was commenting on someone else’s blog. I personally don’t comment that often, so it’s usually something I’m very interested in, so when I do comment, my comments tend to be long, almost like blog posts themselves. So, whenever you comment on something that you’re very interested in, consider making that comment, maybe with a little editing and copywriting, a blogpost. It may contain useful information that’s helpful to someone.

___________________________________________________________

So you want to blog every day, or at least every other day, to keep you content fresh, and to grow your traffic. But just put that into your subconscious mind and see how it reacts! Slave mentality! You’ll end up not blogging at all!

Here’s a tip. Don’t think about blogging. Do something that interests you, whether that’s reading a book, watching a video, playing a game, whatever. Whatever interests you. Follow the thin gold string of your interest, your bliss. A lot of the time when I’m reading or watching something I’m interested in, it’ll spark a relevant thought in my head that I want to write about. Maybe its just something I want to remind myself of.

Don’t worry so much about what your interested in as a whole, like that thing you always here from self helpers, “What’s your passion in life?” Whoa! That’s too big of an emotional chunk for your subconscious to bite off. You’ll put that one off for days, weeks, years, forever. Instead, just ask yourself “What am I interested right now this moment?” It doesn’t have to be some big topic. It can be anything: I want to read this book or blog. I want to watch this podcast or TV show. I want to go play golf. I want to learn how to use this new computer program. I want to go see this movie. Relax. The motif in fairy tales of the rider letting loose of the reins and allowing his horse to decide where to go symbolizes the Ego relaxing and letting the soul be spontaneous.

So just follow your small interest at the moment. It will likely spark a thought that will lead to a blog post. And what’s more, following your small interests will naturally start to open doors where you didn’t know doors existed before, to quote Joseph Campbell. You’re small interests at the moment will likely coalesce into a larger shaped picture. When Einstein was young he followed his small interest in what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. That small interest lead to perhaps the most important scientific theory in history, Relativity.

Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I had absolutely nothing to write about. I had read twitter, listened to some podcasts, but nothing really sparked my interest. I had gotten kind of burned out on some of these topics. I had basically given up on the idea that I would post anything that day. What did that do? It let go of the reins of the horse in my mind. So I was sitting around and I had the small interest in posting one of my existing articles on Digg, just to see how it worked. Instead of posting on Digg, it lead me to searching for Kevin Rose and then to a video of him on an episode of Wine Library TV with Gary V. I wasn’t interested in wine, but I was interested in watching Gary and Kevin do their schtick. It was entertaining. Then one wine in particular caught my attention. So I wrote a small blog post about it simply with the interest of remembering it for myself, nothing else. And once I started writing about it, I had fun writing and inserting the photos (I like messing with photos, its just fun for me).

Now that particular post may not get any traffic to speak of, but you know some of my posts that have gotten the most traffic have come from just such spontaneous impulses.

One of my most popular posts, “How to Make a Transparent Myspace Page” came just that way. I was sitting around and just had the spontaneous interest in fiddling around with my page to make it look better. I just wanted to do something for fun. I found another blog post that taught me how to do just that. And it inspired me to write my own post, so that I could remember it and have it in my own archives in case that page ever went down or I couldn’t find again for some reason. And also because I thought others might have the same interest. That’s a key point:

Whatever interest you have at the moment, however small or insignificant if may seem, there’s bound to be others who have that same interest and are looking for more information about it.

If all of my posts had as much traffic as that one post, my daily traffic would go up 50 times I think.

Another point is that writing is a process of self discovery. Quite to the opposite, writing isn’t about telling people something. Writing is about learning and unexpectedly creating something you didn’t know that you knew because in the process of fun, the power of the subconscious mind is freed.

So to boil the tip down into one statement I’d say:

Don’t worry about blogging today. Even to the point of accepting that you aren’t. Then ask yourself, “What do I feel like doing right now?” Follow that interest of the moment. Ironically without you intending it, it’s very likely a blog post will spontaneously come out of the experience.

What do you think? I would love to hear from you.

October 16, 2009
The Best Dessert Wine with Creme Brulee

Update 12/1/09 – Today I was watching the WineLibraryTV.com show that Gary Vee had with the “Great One” Wayne Gretzky, very entertaining as well. I noticed towards the end they brought up the subject of “ice” wines, specifically those of Canada and Germany, and mentioned that “ice” wines make an excellent dessert wine as well. If you follow the link to the show above you can click the last marker towards the end of the show to see the segment of them talking about ice wines in general and the specific ice wine they are tasting, a 2006 Shiraz Ice Wine from Estate 99, Gretzky’s own wine label. It’s a really cool bottle. Here’s a link to the Gretzky wines. The last two wines at the bottom of the page are ice wines, including the Shiraz.

So, I was thinking of submitting something to Digg and then I realized I didn’t have an account, or do I? Anyway, I thought, what should my username be, my own, something different? So then I thought, “Oh, I wonder what username Kevin Rose uses?”

So you know how one thing leads to another. I search for Kevin Rose on Digg. The second thing that pops up is a link to a video with Gary V and him doing a show on Winelibrary TV. Well, although I’ve never had an interest that much in wine, I couldn’t miss watching two such entertaining people. And the episode was just that, very entertaining. The first two wines tested, Kevin didn’t like very much, but the last, 2005 ChateauRabaud Promis Sauternes, a dessert wine, he raved about. So did Gary. It’s almost worth it to just watch that last segment. And you know what, it engaged me so much that I got interested in that wine. So I wanted to write a blog post about it so I could remember it. The next time I need a dessert wine, I’ll order that. It’ll make me feel very sophisticated and maybe impress my friends. That’s the value in Gary’s show. Even for the non wine enthusiast, the little tidbit of information can give you a little social esteem boost. That’s the “grabber.” In sales they have this thing called “FABG’s” Features>Advantages>Benefits>Grabbers. Here’s the video of Kevin and Gary describing this wine:

It’s 13:25 into the show, ~~or you can just click that third black button to the right on the playhead line to bring you to that point~~ (I now have the video set to play automatically at that point.)

I would suggest you buy it from Gary, but last I checked he was out of stock. Depending on when you read this, you may check with him again. He has a convenient link there under the show for it. If he’s still out here’s a list of vendors from Google Shopping. It’s a little pricey. $45. It’s also offered in a half bottle size for around $24. What are your thoughts? Have you ever had this wine before? Love to know your experience. I’m planning on buying a bottle. Might even make a great gift too.

October 15, 2009
How to Make a Transparent Myspace Page

Update 11/7/09* OK, it will halfway work, or 4/5ths work in 2.0 if you go into Customize Profile, select “No Theme” and then add the code below into the CSS box. But the damn thing is, you have to manually enter it. Won’t let you copy and paste, at least not on my Mac. And then you hit publish and it will say, “You have some custom CSS in your Advanced Edit that may not look right with this theme. Remove the custom CSS?” And you say no, keep the Custom CSS. Then when you publish the majority of your page will be transparent, but that big blue Myspace header is still there. I don’t know how to get rid of that. You can check out my page here: http://myspace.com/stephenkp and my music page which is still on 1.o here: http://myspace.com/stephenpickering

Update 11/7/09*If you haven’t guessed already or wanted to throw rocks at me in the parking lot, this code only works on Myspace 1.0. I just started playing around with Myspace 2.0 today and it doesn’t accept CSS code in the various info boxes that 1.0 did. From my brief playing around, I’ve found that you can sort of kinda do it by putting the URL of your image in the all of the places under “Advanced Edit” or you can import an image if you right click the URL box (Control+Click on a Mac) but I can’t seem to get rid of the massive blue Myspace banner up top, unless I choose the “Snoop Dog” theme, but in which case it lowers my photo and info bar too much. The whole thing doesn’t look as clean either as each “module” and “content” breaks off the continuity of the image. I have a solid red image that’s tiled. I can imagine if you had a photograph, as I once did of my dog, it would be a complete disaster. So the only option I can see is to roll back to 1.0 if you can (it allows me to). I don’t know what the solution is. Do you? Any ideas? And that damn myspace won’t let you cut and paste code into their Customize pane. I noticed there is a CSS box at the bottom of it, so I had to manually enter my code into that (tedious) hoping it would work, but it didn’t. When you save it, it keeps taking out the <> around the <style> tag and adding some gibberish to it. Maybe it would work if myspace didn’t mess up the code like that. I’ll keep looking. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear from you.

So, you want to know how to make your myspace page transparent? I started this blog just as a tool for myself, just to post various things that interested me, so that I wouldn’t forget them, but now its like “Man, I gotta post something everyday!” Funny how the ideas quit pouring in, serendipitously, when your attitude changes. Oh well, for the most part it’s fun. So I was fooling around on my Myspace page and wondering how to make a transparent background on it to make it look cooler, to make me look cooler.

Below is the CSS code to make your Myspace page transparent. It’s pretty cool actually, but it would be nice to learn CSS completely so that I wouldn’t have to always be looking things up, and so that I could use Cascading Style Sheets to make even more custom changes to this and other pages of mine. Below is my Myspace page where I chose a background of a photo that I took of my dog. But you can put any image you want as your background, and still, for the most part, see all the foreground navigational links and boxes, or if you so choose you can make everything transparent on your myspace page.

I wish I could take credit for this, but I can’t. I got it from: this blog.
Go there and you can get the exact instructions (they’re easy) and code that you can copy and pace into your myspace. He’s also got some code there to make the boxes opaque. This is a lot of fun, and looks cool too. It’ll impress your friends, and you’ll really have street cred.
I guess I better reprint his post here in case the link ever goes dead:

For making your myspace profiles – If you dont pimp your profile, you are nobody. People wont respect you in the community. For making cool backgrounds, and your boxes (tables) transparent or moderately opaque, here are some tools I made today.
They are all clean now. if you do a search for these things normally, they will always try to enter in their own ads into your myspace page. dont be violated. I havent sold out yet – so here is some very clean code for pimping your myspace. Be Safe.

For: transparent boxes – custom background image
<STYLE>
td, table, tr, span, li, p, div, textarea, DIV
{
background-color: transparent;
}
body
{
background-image: url(http://XXXXXXXXXX);
background-repeat: repeat;
}
</STYLE>

opaque boxes and a background image>>>>

insert the following inside your style brackets… (What are Style Brackets?)

td.text td.text a img {width:50px !important;}
table, td, textarea, a, body, input{background-color:transparent;border:none;border-width:0}
table table table {border:10px double; border-color: 000000; padding:1; background-color:FFFFFF; filter:alpha(opacity=95); -moz-opacity:0.7; opacity:0.90; -khtml-opacity:0.4;}
table table{border:0px}
table table table table{border:0px}
body {
background-image:url(http:/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX);
}

you can play with the highlighted line to get the degrees how you want it. be careful! you may lose visibility altogether, and then you will have to navigate solely using your instruments.

*Note: This Article was orginally written on February 28, 2008 on another blog, so my Myspace page looks a little different now. It’s still transparent, but with a tiled solid red background.

October 15, 2009
Increase Visitor Length Time on Your Blog
So, I’ve been reading Copyblogger lately and I highly suggest that you do too if you are interested in blogging professionally, and one thing I noticed that they do: At the end of their posts they usually have 4 or 5 Related article links, and I know that’s nothing new, but the key is they link to related articles that are on their blog.

So underneath all of your posts try to increase the number of related post links that link back to posts within your own blog.

Now, depending on your topic, whether you are extremely focused like an exacto blade on one subject like Copyblogger is, or whether you have many topics like I do, this will be easier or harder to do. Of course anyone consulting someone on building a profitable blog would definitely encourage you to focus on one topic, but in my case, here I am. I have a number of interests, and I like to blog about them at different times. Maybe I’ll start to focus more in the future, but for now, here I am.

So for someone like me this will be a gradual project, but it will be beneficial for a number of reasons:
1. I’ll be revisiting older posts in my blog, and it’ll encourage me to research and write more posts within that category
2. It’ll encourage me to read the current related posts on other blogs and learn more about the topic which will increase my knowledge and interest.
3. I can curate and iterate the older posts to make them better
Now, this is more of an art than science. If there is a really good blog post from another site that is very relevant to your topic, you don’t want to delete that link in favor of one of your posts that may be less relevant or not as good. That would be depriving your readership and decreasing the value of your blog. But it will encourage you to read that other post and learn more from it and maybe even inspire you to write another post of your own based on your new knowledge and insight. Also this process can help your headline copywriting. For instance for this post, I can think of two other posts I’ve written related to blogging. The current headlines of the other two posts are “1 Minute Tips: Enable Easy Contact” which I’m going to change to “One Easy Step to Distinguish Your Blog’s Authenticity” and “JS-Kit: A New Opportunity for Blogging Success” which I’m going to change to “The Best Commenting Engine for Your Blog.” Can you see why I’m doing this? Since I’m putting them in related links it forces me to rethink the titles and make them more interesting and inviting. Also these headlines are more of general interest than the older specific ones, making them more searchable.

Note, this whole process, gradual and stress free, will get you interested again in curating your blog, adding value for your readership because the links that you do leave in there will gradually be of higher value and your knowledge on the topic will grow, increasing the number of post ideas you have, and making them more valuable as well.

Hope this little tip helps you and invigorates your interest in your blogs.

What do you think about this technique? Am I right, am I wrong? Do you have better ideas? Love to hear what you think.

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*Tip: Screen Capture on a Mac: Command+Shift+3 for whole screen or Command+Shift+4 for a portion like I did above to capture that small shot from Copyblogger.
October 14, 2009
How to Get Your Congressman’s Attention
Send a stamped, typed, professional letter, preferably on business or similar letterhead and very importantly a RETURN ADDRESS that demonstrates you are from their district.

A real stamped letter. Physical. This will get their attention more than any other way and has the most impact, according to Chris Matthews on Hardball yesterday. I don’t agree with Matthews’ politics, except on his anti-war stance during the Iraq invasion. I’m a Libertarian, but anyway I do believe him on this point. He should know. He’s worked in Congress and covered it for years. I believe he was truthful when he made this statement. So, I’m going to write my Sens. Lincoln and Pryor and Representative Snyder tomorrow in just this manner.

Maybe one letter won’t mean anything, but I’m going to try, and I encourage you to also, no matter what your political beliefs are.

Related:
- The Healthcare Reform Act of 2009
- One of My Senators Just Co-Sponsored the Bill to Audit the Fed!
October 13, 2009